Democrats Shut Down The Republican Party Filibuster On Citizens United, But That Fight Is Far From Won

If you signed any of the pathetic Democratic Party petitions yesterday to "tell Congress to overturn Citizens United, you can be sure yopu will be hit up for cash by corrupt Democratic conservatives like Steve Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz and that your e-mail address will be widely shared and sold and that you will wish you have never signed a petition that isn't troll Congress anything anyway.

Two extremist billionaires and their right-wing Supreme Court are trying to hijack our democracy-- and this could be our last chance to stop them.

The U.S. Senate is voting TODAY on a constitutional amendment that would overturn Citizens United and stop corporate special interests from buying our elections.

…Tell Congress to overturn Citizens United-- we need your signature before the Senate votes on this amendment!

This amendment could be our last chance to level the playing field and repair the damage done by Citizens United. Signing only takes a few seconds; please don't let this opportunity slip away.

Sounds lovely, but accomplishes nothing at all-- except that scheming, slimy professional operatives have captured your e-mail address. Last night, the Senate voted to allow a vote on S.J. Res. 19, Tom Udall's Constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United. Th electoral calculus for all but the 19 most crazy, democracy-hating right-wing fanatics in the Senate was they'd better not filibuster this one. So it will actually get a vote, having passed 79-18. And the 18 most crazy, democracy-hating right-wing fanatics who didn't give a damn what Americans wanted and tried to filibuster the bill-- the usual suspects:

• John Barrrasso (R-WY)
• Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)
• Tom Coburn (R-OK)
• Mike Crapo (R-ID)
• Ted Cruz (R-TX)
• Mike Enzi (R-WY)
• James Inhofe (R-OK)
• Johnny Isakson (R-OK)
• Ron Johnson (R-WI)
• Mike Lee (R-UT)
• Rand Paul (R-KY)
• Rob Portman (R-OH)
• Jim Risch (R-ID)
• Pat Roberts (R-KS)
• Tim Scott (R-SC)
• Richard Shelby (R-AL)
• John Thune (R-SD)
• Pat Toomey (R-PA)

Although 25 Republicans refused to filibuster, almost all of them-- probably all of them-- will vote later this week to kill it in a regular up-or-down vote. To pass it needs two-thirds support (67 votes), and that's not about to happen unless a significant number of Republicans are defeated in November, which looks increasingly unlikely… to put it mildly. Among the Republicans voting against the filibuster were frightened candidates for reelection in November like Miss McConnell, Lindsay Graham (R-SC), Thad Cochran (R-MS), and Susan Collins (R-ME) plus David "Diapers" Vitter, who's trying to run for governor of Louisiana.

Anyone who's been following Rick Weiland's Senate campaign for the open South Dakota seat can't be surprised that Rick is all over this issue. Harry Reid-- who has a stick up his ass about Tom Daschle supporting Rick-- won't allow the DSCC to back Rick but he's been making steady headway against GOP corporate shill Mike Rounds and is now within striking distance-- with ZERO help from the corrupt Beltway Establishment. Something tells me Rick wants to overturn Citizens United a lot more than most of the sitting senators do. Just before they voted he sent this to his supporters:

Today, the United States Senate will vote on a procedural bill which would pave the way for overturning the Citizens United decision that declared corporations are people and money is free speech. Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico has worked hard to get this bill to the floor for a vote.

Citizens United and this year’s McCutcheon decision have allowed billionaires and big corporations to drive public policy in the halls of Congress. Big Money has hijacked our government and put it on their side and against everyday South Dakotans.

...Now, the Big Money crowd is rallying behind the Paul Ryan budget that Mike Rounds supports. The Ryan/Rounds budget proposes to cut Head Start and would turn Medicare into a voucher program. The savings from these cuts and other slashes to important investments would be used to cut corporate taxes and reduce income tax rates on the richest Americans.

The price we pay for Big Money extremism is simple-- the theft of opportunity for everyday citizens to earn their way into or remain in the middle class. History tells us that democracies only work when we have a strong and vibrant middle class.

That’s why passing meaningful campaign finance reform is the single most important thing Congress could do. If we are going to start taking our country back from Big Money, this is the way it starts.

I don’t have any doubt how I would vote if I were in the Senate today. Unfortunately, Mike Rounds has so far refused to support campaign finance reform. Big Money has enough lobbyists in Washington. South Dakotans need a Senator that will fight for them everyday in Washington and with your help, we can take our small, grassroots campaign all the way to Washington.

…In my opinion, there is no greater threat to democracy today than Big Money in the wake of Citizens United. That threat is identical to every other threat history has thrown at Democracy because it is a threat to our equality at the ballot box. And if history has shown us anything it is that, when your voice is lost, your rights soon follow. The simple fact is the only way we can put government back on the side of everyday folks, and not big corporations, is to overturn the Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions,” Weiland said.

All the candidates for the United States Senate have a duty to inform the voters where they stand on this issue.  Are we for unlimited corporate spending which has turned political candidates into full-time fundraisers or should we put common sense checks in place that allow everyday citizens to fully participate in the political process.  It’s that simple. So today, I ask Mike Rounds, Gordon Howie and Larry Pressler how they would vote on Udall’s proposal.

Another Blue America-backed candidate completely committed to over-turning Citizens United, Maine's Shenna Bellows hosted a press conference yesterday City Hall in Portland to voice unequivicable support for S.J.R. 19. She's running against a destructive incumbent, Susan Collins who fakes being a "moderate" while backing her party's worst anti-democracy agenda items. She voted against the DISCLOSE Act in 2012 twice and, unlike Maine's actual moderate senator, Angus King, she refuses to cosponsor this year's version.

Shenna: "Republican Susan Collins has been silent on campaign finance reform long enough. In this election cycle alone, she’s taken more than $1.9 million from corporate PACs. That’s not grassroots democracy-- that’s the rich and powerful using their wealth and influence to buy even more power at the expense of everyday Americans." On the Senate floor today, Elizabeth Warren didn't mince words about the dangers to democracy of the right-wing schemes to allow the wealthy to buy elections. “32 people spent slightly more on the 2012 elections than the 3.7 million typical Americans who sent modest dollar donations to their preferred Presidential candidate," she reminded her colleagues before they voted. "When 32 people can outspend 3.7 million citizens, our democracy is in real danger.”

She appealed to whatever sense of patriotism they have left by explaining that Udall's amendment would “try to reverse the damage inflicted on our country by these decisions. We are here to fight back against a Supreme Court that says there is no difference between 'free speech' and billions of dollars spent by the privileged few to swing elections and to buy off legislators. We are here to fight back against a Supreme Court that has overturned a century of established law in an effort to block Congress from solving this problem. There are times when action is required to defend our great democracy against those who would see it perverted into one more rigged game where the rich and the powerful always win. This is the time to amend the Constitution. I urge my colleagues to support this effort. We were not sent here to run this country for a handful of wealthy individuals and giant corporations. We were sent here to do our best to make this country work for all the people."

Mike Lofgren Willing To Say Aloud What Few Dare: The Roberts Court Itself Is Corrupt

Stuck on awful for the next decade?

Our favorite ex-Republican staffer and operative, Mike Lofgren, was busy at Truthout yesterday, making clear what we all know intuitively, namely that "Even in the absence of what Justice Roberts narrowly defines as 'quid pro quo corruption,' a court that consistently decides all relevant cases on behalf of corporate interests-- most recently McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission-- undermines its own legitimacy as well as the Constitution." The case, Lofgren explains was about how one defines the word "bribe," something we've been looking at for years, since the whole political finance system is rooted in bribery and corruption. He pointed out that "The Roberts court, or five of its nine members, adopted the misanthrope's faux-naïve pose in ruling that private money in politics, far from promoting corruption, causes democracy to thrive because, money being speech, the more speech, the freer the politics. Anatole France mocked this kind of legal casuistry by saying 'The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.'"

Roberts knows he was appointed to be a Supreme Court justice for one reason: to decide relevant cases on behalf of corporate interests. This explains why he made a political move to salvage the Affordable Care Act: The case was a matter of partisan politics before the court. Business interests were roughly divided on the law-- some disliked its mandates and provisions that might drive up their costs, while others saw its potential for allowing them to dump insured employees into pools, or, alternatively to benefit from tax subsidies. Still others may have seen it as a license to mint money. ACA was a costly and convoluted way to insure more people, but Republican hacks saw only one aspect: It was Obama's initiative, so it must be opposed. Roberts saw it as a political squabble involving the other two branches, but on which there was no unified business position. It was a law whose philosophy had a Republican pedigree-- the Heritage Foundation had proposed something like it more than a decade before. If a Republican were president, he might have proposed a similar bill; after all, the president who nominated Roberts engineered the Medicare Prescription Drug Act.

Roberts perceived the deeper dynamic beneath the ideological posturing over ACA, and that is why he had to be the deciding vote of a divided court to save the act. Overturning it would cause millions to question the court's legitimacy on a matter that was not crucial to business interests. Best to save one's powder for more relevant fights. That said, the four dissenting votes also had to vote as they did to render the decision subjectively moot in the minds of Republican jihadists, who would continue to fight the act tooth and nail. As it was, Roberts threw a valuable bone to the Republicans by vitiating the Medicaid mandate to the states. This made it harder to implement the law and permitted Republican governors and legislatures to work all manner of mischief.

McCutcheon was a more relevant fight, and here we see Roberts the avatar of corporations rather than Roberts the tactician. Viewing other justices' decisions through this lens also tightens the focus on an otherwise blurry image. Observers wondered why, during oral arguments in the Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby case, Scalia’s questions implied he was taking a position on religious views in the workplace opposite to the one he had taken in the 1990 Employment Division v. Smith case. In that case, Scalia ruled against employees whose firing for smoking peyote caused them to sue based on alleged violation of their first amendment right to free exercise of religion. But Scalia was perfectly consistent: In the Smith case, and as he appears likely to do in the Hobby Lobby case, Scalia upholds the rights of employers.(2) Neither one is a case about religion per se; they are cases about the superior prerogatives of employers over employees. In like manner, McCutcheon and Citizens United are not cases about campaign finance laws, nor are they, despite the artful smokescreen about free speech on the part of the court's majority, cases about free speech and whether money constitutes speech. They are cases about upholding the superior political privileges of rich interests in society as opposed to poorer ones.

We now have an algorithm to crack the Enigma Code of the Supreme Court. Once there are five members of the court who accept as self-evidently valid the 19th century concept of "freedom of contract," other issues become subsidiary. This framework explains hundreds of cases before the court and clarifies the seeming anomalies like ACA. It explains the court's position in Vance v. Ball State, which made it more difficult to sue employers for harassment, and Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., which barred remedy for pay discrimination (even Congress subsequently saw fit to redress the bias of the court’s decision). In Wal-Mart v. Dukes, the court rejected a class-action suit of women denied raises and promotions. The Roberts court also took the side of corporations against consumers in Mutual Pharmaceutical Company v. Bartlett and AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion. The Roberts Court declared unconstitutional a 1988 law that subjected corporate officers to fraud charges if they could be shown to have deprived clients of honest services.

…Sometimes, like Humbert Wolf's British journalist, judges can be corrupted even in the absence of what Justice Roberts narrowly defines as "quid pro quo corruption." Fallows recommends that Congress enact a fixed term of office for Supreme Court justices. I think that is a good idea, although not just to obviate senescence on the court. It might also wake up citizens to the whole sorry con game if they were forced to contemplate retired honorable justices giving speeches at $500,000 a pop to corporations eager for enlightenment on the finer points of judicial interpretation.

Mark Karlin, also writing at Truthout yesterday, interviewed Nomi Prins, a former Goldman Sachs executive who authored All the Presidents' Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power. Prins' point, in brief, is "that US domestic and foreign policy is largely driven by the interests of economic hegemony and consolidated wealth." Yeah… the whole system is rigged. I know you're not surprised but Prins is a rigorously intellectual insider writing about the symbiotic relationship between the men who run the White House and those who run Wall Street-- over the course of a century. "[F]or the past century," he explained, "mutually reinforcing relationships amongst the most powerful men in the past century were drivers of American domestic, national and foreign policy than just the government was, no matter who the president, or what the party in the Oval. I found that every president had connections of various degrees of closeness with the most influential bankers during his term. I knew these associations existed throughout the decades, but I was surprised to discover just how prevalent they were." What becomes perfectly clear is that these are the people the Roberts Court is working for-- these people and only these people.

Q: Reading your new book, I get the feeling that the privileged few in the private sector who control most of America's money, de facto, don't really give a whit about democracy. What they are focused on is free markets for the plutocracy like a laser. Is that your perspective?

A: The notion of free markets, mechanisms where buyers and sellers can meet to exchange securities or various kinds of goods, in which each participant has access to the same information, is a fallacy.  Transparency in trading across global financial markets is a fallacy. Not only are markets rigged by, and for, the biggest players, so is the entire political-financial system.

The connection between democracy and free markets is interesting though. Democracy is predicated on the idea that every vote counts equally, and in the utopian perspective, the government adopts policies that benefit or adhere to the majority of those votes. In fact, it's the minority of elite families and private individuals that exercise the most control over America's policies and actions.

  The myth of a free market is that every trader or participant is equal, when in fact the biggest players with access to the most information and technology are the ones that have a disproportionate advantage over the smaller players. What we have is a plutocracy of government and markets. The privileged few don't care, or need to care, about democracy any more than they would ever want to have truly "free" markets, though what they do want are markets liberated from as many regulations as possible. In practice, that leads to huge inherent risk.

…Q: How did Bill Clinton, who campaigned on a platform of lifting up the middle class, become an acolyte of Robert Rubin?

A: Every Democratic presidential hopeful campaigns on a platform to help the greater population, or more recently the middle class. Woodrow Wilson campaigned against the concentrated power of Wall Street, though never named names. Yet, it was Jack Morgan he called to the White House before WWI to talk war-financing strategy, and it was Paul Warburg, one of the Federal Reserve architects, that Wilson appointed as one of the Fed's first board members. FDR campaigned against the bankers but worked with them to restructure the banking system to sustain capitalism and supported their open international trade desires because it suited his own. LBJ talked of the Great Society once he was in office, but traded favors behind the scenes with the big bankers to get his policies passed and helped them in return.

So Clinton had historical company. His treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, was a link to substantive funding and the new Eastern establishment elite. Clinton correctly calculated that he needed money and Wall Street legitimacy to get elected. Without Rubin and his friends presenting Clinton through Wall Street, like a debutante, to score funding and support, all the middle-class promises in the world might not have gotten him elected.

Separately, and this is where the like-minded alliance holds, Clinton truly believed in everything Rubin believed in. As Clinton wrote in his memoirs, he got "early invaluable support" from Goldman Sachs executive Ken Brody, who introduced him to various "high-powered business people," including Rubin, whose "tightly reasoned arguments for a new economic policy," Clinton later wrote, "made a lasting impression on me." It's no accident that the swipes at Glass Steagall that George H.W. Bush and his team set in motion, became reality under Clinton. The wheels were in motion already, and Clinton and Rubin sealed the deal. I found records in the Clinton Library of full-scale jubilation in the White House at the way Rubin navigated the repeal of Glass Steagall that are documented in my book. Rubin used the same exact argument and words as Bush's treasury secretary, Nicholas Brady, to fight that deregulation battle-- and they hinged on the need for America to "remain competitive", and if its banks couldn't do what European banks could in mixing financial services, then it would be a blight on the nation as a whole. Parties don't' matter. Power alliances do.

It's also no accident that Hillary Clinton has received hundreds of thousands of dollars to speak at Goldman Sachs gatherings and let them know that Wall Street was treated too harshly in the wake of the 2008 crisis.

Then you had Barack Obama campaigning on a platform of change and throwing the K Street lobbyists and bankers out of the White House. Instead, he gives them the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Exactly, how does a transformation like that happen?

After Washington, Clinton's treasury secretary Robert Rubin went to make millions as a vice chairman at Citigroup. Obama's treasury secretary, Tim Geithner (who had worked as assistant treasury secretary to Rubin under Clinton), went to work for a private equity fund, an enterprise whose now-deceased founder was related to Paul Warburg, one of the architects of the Federal Reserve System and donor to Woodrow Wilson's campaigns, a century ago.

Obama's response in the aftermath of this crisis has been one of coddling the big banks as they've grown bigger. His "sweeping reform," the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, is a joke. It does nothing to constrain the power of the financial elite, because the true political-financial alliance that has allowed the big banks to become bigger, is more powerful than the actions of Congress, even if Congress had been set on doing something real, which it hasn't been. Now, America's largest banks enjoy extensive government backing, not just for deposits, but for their bad bets. The Federal Reserve is carrying a more than $4 trillion book of debt that was never raised to help the population, while it maintains near zero percent interest rates to provide the big banks cheap money.

A transformation certainly doesn't begin with a president who populates his administration with the same people whose philosophy of less rules for their friends brought us to our current situation.  It won't change with Hillary Clinton for the same reasons. It wouldn't' change with Jeb Bush. Honestly, I think we're "stuck on awful" for the next decade.

Yes, stuck on awful

Can Rick Weiland Ride A Populist Wave Of Resentment Against Big Money Wrecking Our Democracy?

The DSCC preview of the electoral cycle that they hand out to big contributors is as upbeat as they can make it. In the section on South Dakota, where Democrat Tim Johnson is retiring, the DSCC asserts that "Democrats and the DSCC are committed to holding Senator Johnson's seat next year and will devote all the resources necessary to elect a new Democratic senator in South Dakota. Recent polls have shown that Democrats are in a strong position to hold the seat. This is another state where a likely divisive Republican primary could force the eventual nominee to the far right. A Tea Party group, the Senate Conservatives Fund, has already pledged to support a Tea Party candidate to take on the GOP establishment candidate, former Governor Mike Rounds."

Even better than a mere Republican primary battle, there are two Republicans who have already vowed to run in the general election, a prospect likely to make it very difficult for Mike Rounds, an establishment shill, to win against a populist Democrat. One of these two ex-Republicans is former GOP congressman and senator, Larry Pressler and the other is extremist teabagger Gordon Howie, who has expressly threatened to upend Rounds' general election campaign if Rounds beats the lunatic fringe teabagger in the primary, state Rep. and mentally deranged racist Stace Nelson.

“I am a Republican philosophically. I am now a registered independent, but I fully embrace the Republican Party platform. That is a significant difference between me and some other Republicans who are running for office,” Howie told The Hill, a reference to former Gov. Mike Rounds, the Republican establishment pick for the nomination.

…“My Stace Nelson signs are staying up through the primary,” he said. “This is basically a plan B, should Stace Nelson not win.”

Howie said a group of supporters had “done the polling and the foundational work and said, ‘Look, if you get in this thing we think you’ll have a good shot at it.' ” He wouldn’t disclose what people had urged him to get in, or the exact polling numbers.

“I was approached by a group of people who said, ‘If you do not get in, Mike Rounds is the next U.S. senator.' And I’ve never been a Mike Rounds fan. Philosophically, he doesn’t represent our conservative values.”

But while Howie hopes to offer a conservative alternative to Rounds, his candidacy runs the risk of opening a wider lane for the Democratic candidate, Rick Weiland… [Pressler] and Howie could draw Republican votes away from Rounds and deliver Weiland the opportunity to win with just a plurality of votes.

A wealthy friend, a big Democratic donor, sent me the the quote from the DSCC in response to a request that he contribute to the Democratic nominee, prairie populist Rick Weiland. My friend was confused because the DSCC listed the Democratic candidate as "TBD," to be determined, and he isn't prepared to contribute unless the DSCC is signaling they're backing Weiland. Executive Director Guy Cecil, the bag of wind who runs the show at the DSCC, having personally picked the weakest Democratic senator, Michael Bennet, as his "boss," isn't ready to give that signal. Although Weiland has been endorsed by Johnson and former South Dakota Senator Tom Daschle, by Independent Bernie Sanders and by almost every Democrat currently in the Senate, including all the champions of ordinary working families: Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkley, Al Franken, Barbara Boxer, Sherrod Brown, Brian Schatz, Mazie Hirono, Ron Wyden, Sheldon Whitehouse, Jack Reed, Patrick Leahy, Ed Markey, Richard Blumenthal, Tom Harkin… Cecil is still in a stage of poutrage that he couldn't get his handpicked Blue Dog, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, who withdrew in a huff when faced with a primary challenge against a real Democrat. Cecil, who has delusions of grandeur and tells everyone he meets he's going to be the campaign manager for Hillary Clinton-- a laughable idea-- is playing with the Democrats' chances of holding onto the Senate majority. He finally did the right thing by endorsing Shenna Bellows but he's still playing childish ego-games with the South Dakota seat.

This week, after the Supreme Court's McCutcheon decision was handed down, Weiland wasn't paying attention to Guy Cecil's dysfunctional management style. He was writing an OpEd, Yelling Fire that went to the very heart of the premise of his entire campaign. All the bolded paragraphs were bolded by Rick, by the way. And when you're done reading, you might want to consider doing what my wealthy friend still hasn't done, contributing to the Weiland for Senate campaign.

The argument that money has the right to speech advanced in Buckley, Citizens United, and now McCutcheon, is of a feather with some of the most infamous decisions of the United States Supreme Court.

The infamy of Dred Scott, Plessy, Minor, and Korematsu is that they denied African Americans, women, and Japanese Americans their fundamental right to have their voices heard equally with those of their fellow citizens. The denial in Dred Scott was far more direct and severe than that of the other cases, but each of these cases involves dangerous denial of that right.

The failure of the Supreme Court to see the danger here results from looking too hard at legal texts and not hard enough at the real world.

For any court to hold that the right of one person to make 100 million dollars in political contributions, and to summon leading candidates for the Presidency of the United States to appear before him so he can judge their fitness for that office, does not infringe upon the rights of his fellow citizens, requires a truly shocking denial of reality.

Political reality today is that America is being turned into a plutocracy by the ability of big money to buy what it wants from Washington, and increasingly from every other level of government as well.

Political reality today is that politicians who used to be public servants are now servants of the big money that elected them.

How else can you explain the endless array of policy decisions at every level of government that are vehemently opposed by large majorities of ordinary citizens, but are made anyway by elected officials. Think about it. 90% plus majorities of the voting public oppose offshore tax havens for billionaires and yet they persist. 90% oppose shutting our government down, yet it is shut down. Oil spills occur, dangerous vehicles are sold, banks evict families from homes they have been conned into buying, payday lenders extort poor families, all practices supported by virtually no one, but permitted to persist, even encouraged by the representatives supposedly elected by the people these things harm.

Each of these policies, and many many more, result from the corrosive effect of big money political contributions. These contributions corrode both parties. They corrode the public's trust in their own government.

They corrode even the word "politics," democracy’s alternative to decision by bloody violence, which has now disastrously been made a synonym for incompetence, greed, and corruption by the mayhem wrought upon it by big money.

When elected officials must spend 80% of their time begging billionaires for money to stay elected, and a Supreme Court does not think that deprives we thousandaires of equal protection of the law, that Court is blind.

The statistics purporting to show that big money influence is not a problem because occasionally a candidate with less money happens to win, are a farce. Of course that happens, but it is irrelevant.  Both candidates are begging for big money, not peoples votes. The staffs of both candidates are meeting with big money donors and lobbyists, not ordinary voters. The consultants who advise candidates make their biggest dollars from big money. Even those in the employ of candidates and elected officials are on the prowl for big money jobs as soon as they can find them.

This and more is what is enabled by decisions like McCutcheon, which defend the right to free speech of a tiny handful of billionaires and powerful institutions by devaluing to the point of near worthlessness the free speech rights of everyone else.

Why, we should ask this court, is the yelling of "fire" in a crowded theater, which is the universally recognized example of speech not constitutionally protected because it infringes on the rights of others, not almost perfectly analogous to what happens when Sheldon Adelson yells in his billion dollar voice, "give me everything I want", so that the 300 million other Americans yelling in their ten dollar voices, "no, please don't," are drowned out?

This and more is why the growth of wealth in America over the last 30 years has gone almost 100% to the richest and most powerful 1% of Americans, and almost not at all to those of us whose voices at the ballot box are being drowned out by a tidal wave of talking money.

The line of "money talks" decisions capped by McCutcheon is a fundamental threat to democracy because it denies the rights of 99% of the American people to compete on a level playing field in the one place that matters most in a democracy, at the ballot box.

That, in my book, reserves for it a place in infamy alongside the very worst decisions ever made by the United States Supreme Court.

Worst, second worst, fifth worst, who cares?  Talking money is destroying our democracy and we need to pass a constitutional amendment to stop it now!

"McCutcheon": a new Roberts Court buzzword to go with "Citizens United"

This is the freest danged speech you ever will see!

"Freedom of speech, in my view, does not mean the freedom to buy the United States government."

-- Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders

"I am concerned that today's ruling may represent the latest step in an effort by a majority of the Court to dismantle entirely the longstanding structure of campaign finance law erected to limit the undue influence of special interests on American politics."

-- Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain

"Today's decision of the United States Supreme Court to strike down any real limit on the purchase of our democracy by big money may be the worst decision made by any Supreme Court since the Dred Scott case reaffirmed slavery in 1857."

-- South Dakota Democratic Senate candidate Rick Weiland

by Ken

In case you hadn't heard:

Supreme Court Defends Wealthy's Right to Own Government
Posted by ANDY BOROWITZ
April 2, 2014


WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) -- By a five-to-four decision, the United States Supreme Court today defended the right of the wealthiest Americans to own the United States government.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts summarized the rationale behind the Court’s decision: "In recent years, this Court has done its level best to remove any barriers preventing the wealthiest in our nation from owning our government outright. And while the few barriers that remained were flimsy at best, it was high time that they be shredded as well."

Citing the United States Constitution, Justice Roberts wrote, "Our founding fathers created the most magnificent democracy in human history. Now, thanks to this decision, the dream of owning that democracy is a reality."

Justice Antonin Scalia also weighed in, telling reporters at the Court, "After all the pro-gay decisions we’ve been making around here lately, it was nice to finally have a win for the good guys."

So now we have McCutcheon v. FEC to go with Citizens United as a shorthand reminder of what the Roberts Court is all about: rereading, if not actually rewriting, the Constitution so that rich guys always finish first.

What it came down to, as it usually does with this Supreme Court, was a flip of the lopsided "Slow Anthony" Kennedy coin, which sometimes comes up "mensch" but much more often comes up "booby." Slow Anthony joined the majority opinion written by Chief Justice "Smirkin' John" Roberts, also joined by Justices Nino "The Brain" Scalia and Sammy "The Hammer" Alito. Also voting with the majority was Clarence Thomas, who wrote his own opinion saying that those other guys are wusses for not having the guts to strike down campaign finance limits of all sorts, so that speech could be really free.

Justice Stephen Breyer took the unusual step of reading a summary of his dissenting opinion, which was joined by the usual left-wing suspects, Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan. Nobody cares what those crybabies said. If you insist, you can read the "Moyers & Company" blogpost "A Blistering Dissent in ‘McCutcheon’: Conservatives Substituted Opinion for Fact."

Just to be clear, Justice Clarence notwithstanding, the justices didn't touch limits on contributions to individual campaigns. Ian Millheiser explains in his ThinkProgress post "How The Supreme Court Just Legalized Money Laundering By Rich Campaign Donors":

Prior to Wednesday's opinion, federal law placed two complementary limits on campaign donors. During the current election cycle, donors may give no more than $5,200 per election cycle ($2,600 for the primary and another $2,600 for the general) to a given federal candidate, and there are also higher limits on how much they can give to party committees and political action committees. These limits remain intact.

What McCutcheon invalidates are aggregate limits on the total amount of money that donors may give to all federal candidates ($48,600) and to all political committees ($74,600). Thus, before Wednesday, donors could spend as much as $123,200 seeking to influence the 2014 election cycle -- now they can spend as much as they want.

Ian goes on to say:

Make no mistake, this decision benefits no one except for a handful of very wealthy donors (and the candidates they give to). Who else can say that they've already given more than a hundred thousand dollars worth of donations and that they are upset that they cannot give even more?

"A major purpose of the aggregate limits," Ian says, "was to prevent money laundering schemes that could enable donors and political parties to evade the cap on donations to individual candidates." He continues:

In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer lays out what some of these schemes could look like. The Democratic or Republican Party, in one example, may set up a "Joint Party Committee" consisting of all three of their national party committees and a state party committee from each of the 50 states. Under McCutcheon, a single donor may now give as much as $1.2 million to this joint committee, which would then be distributed to the various smaller party organizations.

Once the money is distributed, however, it can legally be redistributed to the races where it is likely to have the most impact. Thus, for example, the Republican Party committees in safe red states like Idaho, Utah or Mississippi -- where large infusions of money aren't exactly needed to win elections -- can redistribute their funds to battleground states like Ohio or Florida. Meanwhile, blue state Democratic committees in Vermont and Rhode Island can do the same.

Similarly, the same wealthy donor might decide to write a maximum dollar donation to every single Republican House and Senate candidate in the country -- perhaps by writing a single $2.4 million check to the same "Joint Party Committee" which then distributes the funds. Once this money is distributed, candidates in safe seats can then redistribute at least some of it to candidates in disputed seats -- and the rest can frequently be used to benefit candidates in tough races through "coordinated expenditures."

The chief justice, as Ian pointed out earlier, begins his opinion "with a flourish: 'There is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders.' "

He then spends the next forty pages explaining why that participation includes the right of rich people to attempt to buy elections. Thanks to the decision Roberts and his four fellow conservative justices handed down today (Though Thomas did not join Roberts' opinion, he wrote a more radical opinion calling for all limits on campaign donations to be eviscerated), wealthy donors now have a broad new power to launder money to political candidates -- they just have to be a bit creative about how they do it.

Ian notes that the chief justice denies that money-laundering schemes of the kind he describes will come to pass.

[B]ut many of the arguments he raises to defend this point betray his own naiveté how modern elections work. The Chief Justice argues, for example, that for these money laundering schemes to work a donor would have to engage in "illegal earmarking" -- federal law prohibits a donor from "directing funds ‘through an intermediary or conduit' to a particular candidate." But a wealthy donor does not need to earmark his donations for these money laundering schemes to work. Indeed, it is in both the donor's interest and the party's interest if the donor does not do so. A donor will typically want his money to go to the candidates who are most likely to benefit from his money -- those in closely contested races. By donating to a joint party committee, the donor gives their party more flexibility to redirect their money to the candidates who appear most in need as the election approaches.

Similarly, Roberts claims that "[t]he Government provides no reason to believe that many state parties would willingly participate in a scheme to funnel money to another State's candidates." But this argument assumes that each state Democratic or Republican Party is an island. If Republicans control the Senate, Mississippi's Republican senators have more clout and Mississippi Republicans benefit. The same applies to Rhode Island's Democratic senators when Democrats control the Senate. America has two national parties and it has a national legislature. When Iowa elects Republicans to Congress, that makes it more likely that Republicans in Mississippi will see their preferred policies enacted into law.

Ian does credit the chief with raising "one fairly strong argument in support of his belief that wealthy donors will not resort to complicated money laundering schemes": "Thanks to the line of cases culminating in Citizens United, they won't have to."

Before McCutcheon, wealthy donors basically had free reign to spend as much money as they wanted seeking to influence elections, just as long as they give that money to "independent" organizations such as super PACs. In light of this body of law, why would a candidate resort to an elaborate money laundering scheme when they can simply write a check to the super PAC of their choice?

It's a good question, and not an easy one to answer. But it's hardly an argument for eliminating even more limits on how far the wealthy can go to influence elections. If allowing a single person to spend millions of dollars to change the outcome of an election is a bad idea, then it is a bad idea no matter what kind of legal regime permits that spending to take place.

WINNERS AND LOSERS

Fortunately, in case you want to handicap this horse race, washingtonpost.com's Fix-master Chris Cillizza is already on the job:

WINNERS

* Party committees:  The competition among party committees -- Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee vs. the Democratic Congressional Committee vs. the Democratic National Committee, for example -- is over.  Instead of competing to be the recipient of the $32,400 an individual donor could contribute to a national party committee each year, now the committees are each free to collect $32,400 each from a major giver willing to write that sort of check. To the extent they can find donors willing to write those checks -- there were fewer than 700 people in the 2012 cycle who would have been affected by McCutcheon -- that's a financial boon for the party committees.

* Big donors:  Wealthy individuals are now able to spend more of their own money on more candidates and more campaign committees. If you wanted to spread your wealth around to, say, every Republican candidate running for Senate this year, you can now do it.

* State parties:  State parties had been starved by the aggregate limits. Donors, especially major givers, like to give to the politically sexier causes. And that tends to be federal candidates and national party committees. By the time that giving was done, donors were typically at or close to their $74,600 giving limit to all political action and party committees. Now, under McCutcheon, a donor could, theoretically, give the federal limit of $10,000 to every single one of the 50 state parties.

LOSERS

* Campaign finance reformers: While the aggregate limit was part of the post-Watergate campaign finance reforms in 1974, it was adopted as part of the package of changes to the campaign funding system that Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) pushed through Congress at the start of the last decade. "I am concerned that today’s ruling may represent the latest step in an effort by a majority of the Court to dismantle entirely the longstanding structure of campaign finance law erected to limit the undue influence of special interests on American politics," McCain said in a statement Tuesday morning.

Well, you know those campaign finance reformers. Another bunch of crybabies.

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